🎥 Built an AI-Powered Video Creation Tool. Here's What Worked, What Didn't, and What We're Still Figuring Out.

Hey Indie Hackers 👋

I’m Max, a solo dev turned co-founder. Over the last 7 months, my small team and I have been working on something that started as a side project and slowly evolved into a real product:
👉 Textideo – https://textideo.com

It’s an AI-powered tool that turns text or images into short-form videos – fast. Think of it as a lightweight creative studio for indie creators, marketers, or founders who want to make video content without spending hours editing.

We recently launched our MVP and got our first paying users. We're not making crazy revenue yet, but the progress is real. Here's a breakdown of what worked, what didn’t, and what we’re still trying to get right.

✅ What Worked

1. Solving our own problem
   I’ve tried creating short videos for product launches and social posts, but tools like Adobe or even Canva felt heavy. We wanted something quicker — and honestly, more fun to use. That itch led us to build Textideo.

Turns out, a lot of solo founders and content creators had the same pain point.

2. Landing page first, code later
   Before writing a single line of backend logic, we set up a landing page and collected 600+ emails from a few Reddit posts, indie communities, and cold outreach. That list helped us shape what features to build first.

3. Focus on “one action = instant result”
   Most users don’t want to learn how AI works. They want it to work.
   So we built Textideo to be ridiculously simple:

Type your idea

Click one button

Get a video

That simplicity turned out to be one of our best “conversion features.”

❌ What Didn't Work

1. Relying on Twitter too much
   We thought Twitter (sorry, X) would be a growth channel. But honestly, unless you already have a decent following, it’s a hard place to get traction for a brand-new tool. Time spent crafting threads = low ROI.

2. Overbuilding early features
   We spent weeks polishing a “scene-based editor” that nobody really used. People just wanted quick results — not to micromanage each frame. We learned to cut fast and get feedback faster.

3. Paid ads with no clear funnel
   We ran $200 in test ads with Meta. Clicks? Yes. Conversions? Almost none. Without a clear hook or landing page funnel, money burned fast. Lesson learned.

🤔 Still Figuring Out
Who our core user is. Creators? Agencies? Startup founders? We’re still running tests and interviews to narrow this down.

How to balance “instant results” with customization. Users love fast generation, but advanced users also want control. Still testing that balance.

Distribution. Product is important — but finding the right channels is 10x harder.

👀 If You Want to Check It Out
We’re actively improving Textideo based on real feedback. If you create content, launch products, or just want to try turning your ideas into visual stories — feel free to try it out:

🔗 https://textideo.com

Any thoughts, feedback, or brutal honesty are more than welcome. 🙏
And if you’re building something too, drop it below. I’d love to see it.

Thanks for reading — and thank you to this community.
You’ve been a huge inspiration through the whole process.